10 HTML Tag Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit

You better watch out, because the HTML police are about. They scour your code and pick out the most unspeakable crimes against HTML markup. This handy list of ten HTML tag crimes sheds some light on some of the most common coding mistakes and helps provide an alternate solution. Tips include writing valid markup, making semantic choices, avoiding deprecated tags and more!

Crime 1: Placing Block Elements Inside Inline Elements

HTML elements can either be displayed in two ways, Block or Inline. Each tag by default is naturally either a block or inline element. Block elements include divs and paragraphs, that make up the structure of the document. Inline elements on the other hand should sit inside block elements and go with the flow of the document, examples include anchors and span tags. With this in mind, inline elements should always go inside block elements, and never the other way around.

Crime 2: Not Including an ALT Attribute on Images

The ALT attribute is a required element on all images displayed on a web page. It helps users determine what the image is, should they be browsing on a screen reader, or simply on a slow connection. The ALT attribute should describe the image being shown, so an alt=”image” is bad practice. If the image is purely for decorative purposes, simply add an empty alt attribute, such as alt=””.

Crime 3: Not Using Lists When Necessary

The handy UL (and OL) tags have a bunch of uses and are extremely versatile for the display of all kinds of page items. Unsurprisingly the Unordered List tag does a great job of displaying a list of information, so don’t even think about using a bunch of line breaks ever again!

Crime 4: Using <b> and <i> for Bolding and Italicizing

The <b> and <i> tags make the text appear bold and italic respectively, but semantically they are classed as presentational tags, therefore the effect would be best replicated with the CSS styles of font-weight and font-style. If the passage of text suggests areas of importance, they should be highlighted with the <strong> or <em> tags, which basically do the same job as <b> and <i>, but also make the world a nicer place.

Crime 5: Using Too Many Line Breaks

The line break tag of <br /> should only be used to insert is single line breaks in the flow of paragraph text to knock a particularly word down onto a new line. It shouldn’t be used to make gaps between elements, instead, split the text into separate paragraphs, or adjust the margin styled by CSS.

Crime 6: Using The Wrong Strikethrough Tags

In the olden days, <s> and <strike> were around to allow edits and amends to web text. However they are now classed as deprecated tags, which means they still work fine (in Transitional), but there’s a set of new tags on the block – <del> and <ins>. These new tags are used together to show deleted, and the subsequently inserted text in a document.

Crime 7: Using Inline Styling

You’ve heard it a thousand times – Inline styling is bad. The whole point of semantic HTML and CSS is to separate document structure and styling, so it just doesn’t make sense to go placing styling directly in the HTML document. Remember to always keep your styles in your stylesheet where they belong.

Crime 8: Adding or Removing Borders in HTML

The border attribute is another presentational effect, so semantically it should be left to the CSS, even if it’s removing a default border from an element.

Crime 9: Not Using Header Tags

Header tags are available all the way from <h1> to <h6>, and make handy tags to separate your document into titled sections. If you have a selection of words indicating what content is due to appear next, chances are one of the header tags will fit right in. Your choice of header tag depends on the flow of your document, try to naturally insert them in order of 1-6 where appropriate.

Crime 10: The Unspeakable Use of <blink> or <marquee>

Apart from not even being part of the official collection of standard HTML endorsed by the W3 Consortium, the <blink> and <marquee> tags are just pure ugliness. If there’s something you need to draw attention to, I’m sure you can think of plenty of alternate ways to draw focus to that area of the page than to have it flash on and off or scroll across the page!

Great post! Especially love the hate toward the marquee tag. I actually have a new client that just came to me, and his website currently uses it. Worst part is he thought it looked cool. At least he avoided the blink tag.

It’s a shame that some large email clients (inc Outlook, Gmail) don’t agree with Crime 7.
They seem to ignore most HEAD content, inline styles seems the only compromise.
Thunder… Thunder…. aaaaaarrgh!!

I guess one of the most prominent problems is designers and coders alike unintentionally wrapping a block element in an inline element – and the most prevalent examples are wrapping a block element with <a> … </a> tags. Although the codes are still rendered properly in most browsers, further perpetuating the wrong information that it’s okay to do so (eg – making whole link blocks clickable by wrapping them in <a> … </a>), there are valid ways to go about doing so.

I second the very last crime – I’ve seen just too much of it. They make me all woozy, especially blink.

This is a great list, and I certainly wouldn’t argue any of these points. It’s great to be reminded of them.

But, yeah, let’s be honest, when dealing with large CMS sites with frequently updated content, inline styles/css can be a useful tool/cheat. I’m not talking about your average wordpress blog, but multi-tiered sites with complex css structures controlling various elements. Not all of us have the support staff to have someone comb submitted content to make sure it is semantically pure.

I think the most realistic thing we can do as developers/designers is build a semantically sound foundation that is able to support a certain degree of html slop from authors. And sometimes, indeed, you just need to style something quick.

My knowledge of CSS is not brilliant, subsequently, things like doing borders in the style sheet generally leads to utter disaster and so I revert back to html to get the job done and move on (as well as saving my sanity)

Yes. I would need to have a personal assistant to do everything else in my life that I would no longer be able to do because I have to update all my code. I agree these are best practices but they are hard to implement retroactive on an established blog. I am slowly chugging along making these changes.

1. Who gives a fuck about strong versus b. What the hell is the different? Use styles in the css if anything. If you’re going to use tags in the html…who fucking cares which?

2. Who cares which strike through tag you use! You apparently are one of these blokes that insists on always using the latest and newest shit. I’d say older stuff is better if, like with all these tags, they all do the same fucking thing. The older ones are more likely to work because who doesn’t know of them? The newer ones have a higher chance of not working since some people may not have bought into them yet.

3. Sometimes using a styleinside a tag is necessary to take maximum precedence. It’s rare – but it’s made possible for a reason.

4. All these 10 “rules” are just opinions for people who buy into the strict methods and who think their farts don’t stick. Most of them actually don’t make a difference. The day they throw syntax errors is the day I’ll fully abide by them. Until then, I’ll take strict rules with C++ and Perl, but not HTML. This is all just OPINION.

STFU, Eric. Some people call all html tags tags, even when they’re elements or when they’re just things that manipulate elements. If they’re inside so a lot of people they’re tags. Whoopie fucking doo.

I think your bang on with everything other than the ‘b’ tag . The ‘strong’ tag is used when you want to add emphasis to particular words or phrase, but some screen readers may use a different inflection when they come across these tags to communicate the emphasis. if your aim is to make a work bold always use ‘b’ tag never ‘strong’ b’ tag works in almost very browser known!

On the other hand the ‘b’ tag is presentational, therefore semantically, should be left to the CSS.

Plus, if something on the page that is being made bold, it would suggest that it’s an element that need emphasis – so here’s when the strong tag comes into play. If not, then chances are a simple span would fit better.

I get your point though, during my research I read about screenreaders interpreting ‘b’ and ‘strong’ differently. But overall, if the BBC don’t use ‘b’, that’s good enough for me :-)

I’d have to agree, in some way, with this. If you sole intention is to create bold text, without any other real meaning, then the “b” element might be the way to go—though a “span” with a class might be another solution.

There are cases where you might want to use the “i” element too. For example, in Latin names of animals/plants you should italicise part of the name (the species bit) and to use the “em” element would be semantically incorrect. You could use an “i” element with a class of “species” for example, which would give semantic meaning to the element.

All that said, cases where those two elements can correctly be used are few and far between, so it’s unlikely that you’ll ever need to use them.

From what I understand, crime 1 and 4 are allowed in HTML 5,«b» and «i» are there to mark stuff like company name that are not more meaningfull so they don’t require a «strong» of «em».
Yes I know, another set of new rules again.

It would be good if you gave some specific reasons for not doing these things beyond simply saying “don’t do that, do this instead”.
How would you handle a situation where you want to make an entire block of information clickable with a link to a detail page? For example, if you have a list of people with some basic information displaying for each, and you want to be able to click anywhere on that person’s “Block” to be directed to their entire bio.

No you wouldn’t. Using Javascript instead of links breaks semantics a lot more than using B tags instead of Strong does; for instance, you lose the ability to middle-click a link to open in a new window/tab.

Any time you write function(){document.location.href=’anotherpage.html’;}, a kitten dies – but it should be you.

I think it’s important to note for beginners that there are times when it’s OK to break the “no inline styles” rule. There IS a time and place for them.

For instance, let’s say I want my H2 tag to be a different color on each of the 20 pages of my website. Is it better to use an inline style for each one, or add 20 more lines to my stylesheet that have to be loaded for every page hit on my site? Sure, twenty lines isn’t bad but when you have a complicated website that’s NOT based on a cookie cutter template, that number can grow fast! There’s no good reason to bloat your external CSS with numerous styles that are only used once, other than trying to be technically correct.

Other than that, I must say your article is very nicely written. Thanks.

At that point, I believe you would use styles in the head with the appropriate classes/ids or just targeting the standard tags. I’m hard pressed to think of a reason inline styles would have to be used when I’m not just feeling lazy and don’t want to do it right. :P I’ve done it before.

I agree with Dana also, but there is one specific instance where inline styles are appropriate: dynamically generated divs that are being affected by jquery’s (for example) animation functions. Sometimes a div needs display: none to begin with, and doing that with a class doesn’t always work.

I have to agree with Dana, the only time I’ve used inline styles is when I’m feeling lazy. Sometimes, yes, you may want to target classes/id’s specifically on that page, but it would be better to make a specific stylesheet for this, or as Dana mentioned, add it to the head of the document, and not within each particular element. I think most people have done it before, myself included, but it makes for messy code.

I would’ve thought most of these would be common sense. Crime 5 needs an explanation, whats wrong with extra tags? Well it’s like faking a new paragraph. Looks fine and causes no problems for sighted users but for screen reader users their software doesn’t know to “draw breath”.

No, they shouldn’t. The del tag has a specific semantic meaning, separate from how it looks. If people are using del just to give their text a decorative line-though, they are DOIN’ IT WRONG, as the kids say.

Well I don’t kow some things out there just make sense but also means a hell of extra work in the end.

I mean, if a simple “i” will do the italic job, why should I type lots of extra characters and extra files (the css sheet)?

Well, except when talking about deprecated tags, many of this “rules” just seem pointless and dictatorial to me. I mean, who said I can’t use five BR tags if I want to jump five lines? won’t it work fine in any browser? yes it will. isn’t the BR tag out there to be used? yes it is. So… I really don’t get the atual point of some of this rules some people put as “crimes”. BR are crimes now heh? Oh c’mon!

I go for the easiest, specially if it means the same result at all.

And what about the first tip: what if I want the whole block element to work as a hyperlink, and not just the text inside it? in this case I have to place the “a” tag outside the “div”, cause I want all the div to be a link (without java’s onclicks either).

I’m going to make the assumption based on your post that you also use tables for layout. Web standards are like a toolbox full of tools. Your approach is essentially choosing to use the hammer to make a hole. Will it work? Sure. However, any professional will tell you that a drill is the right tool for that job.

If you think using a style sheet is extra work and the “i” tag isn’t deprecated then I am curious where you have been for the last, I don’t know, 10 years or so?

If it shows up correctly on the 2-3 major browsers, who cares? Customers aren’t looking through my code saying, “Gee, I really wanted to buy a scooter from this site, but… they’ve got a {B} tag in the code. I’ll just buy from someplace else!”

If you want a piece of text to be bold or italic, use the B or I tags. If you want to (strongly) emphasise a piece of text, use EM or STRONG. Don’t use EM to make your text italic or STRONG to make text bold.

@kL bold and italic are only semantic for visual presentation – they hold no meaning for a screen-reader. How do you interpret “bold” if you are reading it allowed to some one else for example?

Remember the whole point for the revised markup was to make the documents structure independent of presentation and B/I tags do not allow that as they inherently refer to presentation and not to the meaning of the document.

Meah. I used to preach this stuff back a few years ago, but find myself caring less and less these days. Please don’t tell me that a screen reader really sees more value in ‘strong’ than ‘b’ tags. And if so, its the GD fault of the screen reader.

And in-line styles are kind of necessary when you enter JavaScript development. Plus, if you truly need the style only once, then it seems easier to me to maintain if it’s right there in the markup. This coming from a guy who used to quote the whole “separation of markup and presentation” thing all the time.

Which, btw, I have yet to see ANY real benefit from. Honestly, if you use a stylesheet for every single style rule on your page, it will become a bloated mess over time, with 1000 entries.

I probably made all the mistakes on the list (except blink of course) at least once during my rather short web career.
But as I got more experienced with web standards by now, I totally agree with every point on the list. Its not like we have to code that way but “code is poetry” and I’d rather like to code nice stuff. Not to please others or customers but to please my conscience ;)

I disagree with people that want to split up everything endless much. You can’t found things at one place, you need to go to a chain of references/functions/whatever to get the big picture. Why not making something global when it need to be shared and not everytime? Use the tags that suit your needs, you are not going to be punished, but its good to think one step ahead and being aware of the risks. Read, test, expriment and make your own opinions, its not written in stone.

I didn’t realise the first one until I validated my code using the strict Doctype. Yay for validation! If you get the web developers toolbar and validate your XHTML, CSS and accessibility there’s less chance you’ll be committing those HTML tag crimes!

How do you handle inline images in a way that a feedreader will properly display the image? Using classes and CSS with float:left/right will make the result look quite ugly in a feedreader, inline styles work better in that case. Any suggestions?

I am so guilty of a lot of these crimes!!! But I guess that’s what happens when you are self-taught. In the last couple of years I have managed to get away from a lot of these crimes but I’m glad you posted this because now I can be more aware of my faults. Thanks for the reminder.

BTW… Kudos on the Thundercat shout outs. That cartoon brings back great childhood memories.

I disagree with the point on inline styles. Inline styles are just find as long as you don’t abuse them. If you have a corner case here and there, inline styles are a lot cleaner than an overly bloated CSS file.

Wicked article! especially for a someone like me who’s in the learning stage of webdesign and wishes to do things right from the start, as opposed to getting into bad habits (that’ll come later no doubt).
Thanks.

Alt tags should be empty unless the image contains information related to the text. That is, if the image is just some bling for the page and you add alt text your just spamming the poor visually impaired guy with useless noise. how often do you in a conversation stop and say ‘panthro from the thundercats’ then continue talking ?

imho, a counter-crime on the b and i tags is overuse of strong and em. b and i are often actually the correct tags for bold and italic when the content is semantically bold or italic. i.e., a book title or a ship’s name that takes italic should actually get the i tag (since you’re not really emphasizing that bit, but italicizing it).

An Excellent list and the Thundercats touch was great, although Transformers would have been better. :-) I’m adding this blog to my feed reader and going to fix my tags. I’m still working off my knowledge from 1996.

Do you really think that a “strong”a-tag is more important than a CSS-Strong-a-tag?

A Link is not more or less than a Link, a Bold Link ist only a Style, if you have a Linklist with many Links then “strong” is the way to style the one more important Link Bold. If you have only strong Links – CSS is the better way.

Disagree (slightly) with and tags. They are *not* the same as and . For example, is used for emphasis, and the formatting is dependent upon CSS. Italics, on the other hand, are mandated for the titles of books, and have a different semantic meaning than emphasis. For example, the CSS may designate as using a bold face, but book titles still need to be in italics.

I’ve written a tutorial for an art Ning site, and had to space down from a photo. I hate to say it: I used the line break umpteen times to get the photos positioned where I wanted them. I am totally unused to html – what code should I have used instead?

Glad to see I’m not a super-criminal. The only one I didn’t know about was the & but I’ve never really had occasion to use them anyways.
The only time I use inline styling if there’s just the one bit on a single page that needs to be different. Do I need a lawyer? :-)

Nice article!
There is only one place where inline CSS is unavoidable, and those are HTML-newsletters. Most e-mailclients don’t support external CSS and will strip any CSS that is placed in the header or body.

Cliff is right. The real crime is using {em} and {strong} when they aren’t appropriate.

If we’re working toward a semantic web, we need to focus on using those tags correctly. The web is full of things like {em}The Grapes of Wrath{/em}. That can get very annoying to someone who uses a text-reader and has to hear book titles emphasized every time they are mentioned on a webpage.

{em} and {strong} are usually lies. At least {i} and {b} give no information.

It’s good to see some other people backing me up on the usefulness of {b} and {i}. I was discussing this with a co-worker recently and found that the HTML5 spec makes some good points about when it’s appropriate to use those tags:http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-i-element

Cliff definitely makes some good points. Agreed across the board. As far as using titles in {a} tags, never done it but perhaps I should start. Thanks for the roundup. I spend most of my time focusing on database programming, but it’s always refreshing to find ways to improve my markup.

I disagree with rule #10, and I’m not the only one. I’m not saying you should use the ‘marquee’ and ‘blink’ tags, but the effect, at least for ‘marquee’, could be useful for a short headline. So it really isn’t ugly, if done right. In fact the effect is to be added in to CSS3, so someone finds it useful, other than me.

I’m in favor of the semantic-only approach, in theory, but it’s clear that most people don’t understand that just because something is visual doesn’t make it non-semantic.

The term “strong” is especially funny I think. Whoever had referred to strong text or described bold-set words as “strong” before the invention of this misguided element? There is no such thing as “strong” text. As for emphasis, well, should we have a sarcasm tag too, depending on the particular (semantic) meaning of the italics?

If this is the point — to break down semantic typographic attributes into abstract meanings (perhaps in the name of accessibility), why don’t we have a span around each and every word with a “dictionaryid” attribute indicating its specific meaning (assuming the meaning has been registered by some bureau of language standards — otherwise, should you really be using a non-standard word? It might not validate).

Do whatever works unless there’s actually a reason not to. Consecutive line-breaks? There may be a more efficient way to do that (unless you only need the gap once), but it’s not like there’s any browser that won’t understand the br tag… I don’t like this dogmatic approach at all.

Inline styling (Crime 7) is not a crim!! Many famous giants like google, yahoo, w3.org use it & recommends them.
They come in handy when you do not wanna load a new stylesheet file for just few new lines of styling, Instead you can use inline style tag to achieve performance.

I take most of these for granted but the online styling doesn’t sit very well with me. Obviously it’s best to put everything into CSS but sometimes it’s actually more convenient to add a width to an id/class-less div than to give that div an arbitrary id or class that will be hard to track down later – should I need to ammend it. What I am considering is a more modularised approach entirely:

This would negate the entire problem: I’d say heights and widths are the most frequent examples where the above usage could come in handy. I already use classes like the above to float or align elements and chain them on to the HTML.

Great page of advice! – I have used many of those things in the past and some I still do *ashamed face* I know I’m really just too lazy. But I do go back and change my site with these kind of things in mind when i have time.

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